The 12 days of GCHQ quizmas: test your brain power with these daily puzzles

The irrationality of cheating at gamified learning

Game mechanics can make the learning process more sticky, but they can also encourage cheating. How do you make sure that the logic of the game doesn't overtake its intended educational purpose?

As I came to the end to the end of my daily vocabulary exercises, I clicked on the little icon that said "Ranking" on the side of the screen. It had become a sort of habit -- you might say a guilty pleasure -- to check my progress against others learning languages on the same website. There had been a certain satisfaction when I first spotted my name amongst the top ten of users who had started at the same time as me, or the moment when my overall ranking passed from the ten thousands to a mere four figures. It was meaningless, of course. There was no prize for winning and no-one would be impressed by my progress up the charts.

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It was just one of the little rituals that somehow made the process of improving my French more compelling.

On this occasion, however, upon clicking and redirecting, I was greeted by something quite different to what I had expected. No charts, no leaderboard, but a polite notice in an unassuming sans-serif. "Regrettably," it began, "we have had to temporarily disable leaderboards on Memrise after extensive cheating has been brought to our attention, some of which has been slowing down the site for the whole community."

Memrise launched in private beta three years ago and is just on the verge of launching its non-beta version 1.0. In 2010, it was named one of Techcrunch's start-ups of the year and last year garnered a whole swathe of favourable press, from Fox News' Cool Site of the Day to MIT

Technology Review. The idea, founder Ed Cooke tells Wired.co.uk, is "pretty simple: make learning as effective and enjoyable as possible".

Cooke is an Oxford University graduate who became a Grand Master of Memory at 23 (for which he had to memorise 1,000 random number and ten decks of cards in an hour) and went on to coach American freelance journalist, Joshua Froer, to become 2006 USA Memory Champion. So when Ed talks about packing Memrise "with all the science we can muster", well, that's a fair bit of science. In this case, a combination of "vivid imagery", "elaborate testing' and "spaced repetition" taking advantage of the effect first noticed by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885 stating that last minute cramming is a lot less productive than a little and often over a longer period.

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Memrise couples these techniques with a wiki library of "mems" (mnemonics) and what Cooke calls a 'Farmville-style learning game, where you plant words, grow them, water them, and see in your "memory garden" the scope and splendour of all the things you have learned.' Since its Facebook app launched in 2009, Farmville, with its addictive simplicity and viral transmission, has provided the model for a trend towards "gamification" that has taken the worlds of business and marketing by storm. It was while being mentored by one of the bosses of Zynga, Farmville's creators, that Memrise developed its garden metaphor and game-like interface.

They are not, however, the only language acquisition site on the block. Duolingo only went public in June of this year but it quickly racked up a few hundred thousand eager users. The brainchild of reCAPTCHA inventor Luis von Ahn and his graduate student, Severin Hacker, the idea came from a desire to "translate the web into every major language". The problem, von Ahn told me, is that "machine translation is just not very good yet." It soon became apparent that such a task would take millions of people - happily, "there are over 1 billion people learning foreign languages in the world and many of them translate some stuff while learning." Luis and his team put two and two together and Duolingo was born.

If the model sounds like it takes its cue from the "artificial artificial intelligence" of Amazon Mechanical Turk, its more the case, as von Ahn delicately puts it, that "Mechanical Turk was inspired by earlier work". In 2002, von Ahn created the ESP Game which was bought by Google and became Google Image Labeler. His PhD thesis in 2005 was the first work to talk about both "human computation" and "games with a purpose". Duolingo shares with Memrise certain elements familiar from computer games -- you can gain points and lose lives -- but von Ahn is wary of the word "gamification". "Everybody," he says, "is 'game-ified' now". Ed Cooke likewise, calling it a term 'you have to hate' while allowing that incentives like leaderboards and point scoring are important for keeping people interested "minute by minute".

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The suspension of Memrise's leader boards, however, seems to raise the question of what happens when the logic of the game starts to overtake itself. Margaret Robertson, game designer and managing director at Hide&Seek design studio, spoke to me of a "desire to cheat" which lurks behind the competitiveness of gaming, and in the case of Memrise this seems to have run riot. The original suspension message spoke of "bots", "dummy courses" and even a "small army of children" employed to rack up scores. Cooke didn't wish "to glorify some of the bizarre lengths people have gone to cheat on Memrise" but he did point to a "whole genre of YouTube videos" on the topic, some of which -- showing twelve windows open at once auto-completing each other -- have notched up several hundred views.

For theorist Ian Bogost, author of How to Do Things with Videogames, the problem is not with gamingper sebut comes from mistaking games for "points-machines" rather than what he calls "experience-machines". As Robertson puts it, games are "safe spaces we opt into"and a good game will circumvent the temptation to cheat by "preparing for it and embracing it" much as many of the classic console games did.

Both Cooke and von Ahn told me about plans to incorporate more competitiveness and more gameplay into their respective platforms, so perhaps the cure for gamification's excesses is simply more gamification.